Best Care at Lower Cost
Best Care at Lower Cost

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2013-05-10

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 0309282810

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America's health care system has become too complex and costly to continue business as usual. Best Care at Lower Cost explains that inefficiencies, an overwhelming amount of data, and other economic and quality barriers hinder progress in improving health and threaten the nation's economic stability and global competitiveness. According to this report, the knowledge and tools exist to put the health system on the right course to achieve continuous improvement and better quality care at a lower cost. The costs of the system's current inefficiency underscore the urgent need for a systemwide transformation. About 30 percent of health spending in 2009-roughly $750 billion-was wasted on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud, and other problems. Moreover, inefficiencies cause needless suffering. By one estimate, roughly 75,000 deaths might have been averted in 2005 if every state had delivered care at the quality level of the best performing state. This report states that the way health care providers currently train, practice, and learn new information cannot keep pace with the flood of research discoveries and technological advances. About 75 million Americans have more than one chronic condition, requiring coordination among multiple specialists and therapies, which can increase the potential for miscommunication, misdiagnosis, potentially conflicting interventions, and dangerous drug interactions. Best Care at Lower Cost emphasizes that a better use of data is a critical element of a continuously improving health system, such as mobile technologies and electronic health records that offer significant potential to capture and share health data better. In order for this to occur, the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, IT developers, and standard-setting organizations should ensure that these systems are robust and interoperable. Clinicians and care organizations should fully adopt these technologies, and patients should be encouraged to use tools, such as personal health information portals, to actively engage in their care. This book is a call to action that will guide health care providers; administrators; caregivers; policy makers; health professionals; federal, state, and local government agencies; private and public health organizations; and educational institutions.

Social Work and Community Care
Social Work and Community Care

Author: Malcolm Payne

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1995-06-07

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1349240133

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Social Work and Community Care makes a powerful case for the effective involvement of social work skills, knowledge and values as part of the effective development of policy and multi-professional practice in community care. Malcolm Payne shows how ideas of community and community care are entwined with the development of social work and the social services. Each stage of the community care process is examined in turn to show how social work liaison and interpersonal skills are needed in creating and implementing care packages effectively.

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care
Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care

Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 195

ISBN-13: 0309493439

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Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.

A Shared Destiny
A Shared Destiny

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2003-03-05

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 0309168570

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A Shared Destiny is the fourth in a series of six reports on the problems of uninsurance in the United States. This report examines how the quality, quantity, and scope of community health services can be adversely affected by having a large or growing uninsured population. It explores the overlapping financial and organizational basis of health services delivery to uninsured and insured populations, the effects of community uninsurance on access to health care locally, and the potential spillover effects on a community's economy and the health of its citizens. The committee believes it is both mistaken and dangerous to assume that the persistence of a sizable uninsured population in the United States harms only those who are uninsured.

Community Health Care Development
Community Health Care Development

Author: Deborah Hennessy

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1997-11-11

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1349139068

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This book brings together a range of different experts to give a multidisciplinary perspective on recent changes in the health service. It focuses particularly on the effect of those changes for community nurses and their clients. The practical implications are always to the fore making this essential reading for community nurses and their management colleagues.

The Price We Pay
The Price We Pay

Author: Marty Makary

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1635574129

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New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

Care in the Community
Care in the Community

Author: Martin Knapp

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-14

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 0429840233

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First published in 1992, this second book in the series fully described the evaluation programme and seeks to answer pressing questions of policy and practice This book is split into four parts: Introduction to the pilot programme, the projects and their clients; the policy contexts; the objectives; the research methodology. The Process of care: financing, accommodation and service use, staffing, case management, joint working. Evaluation: Outcomes for clients and others, and costs, for each of the client’s groups (people with learning difficulties, people with mental health problems, elderly people and people with physical disabilities). Finally this book aims to further discuss, Policy and practice implications.

Missing Voices
Missing Voices

Author: Stephanie Brown

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13:

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Motherhood is often portrayed as one of the most fulfilling experiences in a woman's life. Books on pregnancy, birth and motherhood not only tell women what they should do, they also encourage them to have high expectations of what is inevitably a 'journey into the unknown'. Missing Voices isdifferent: its authors offer no prescriptions. Instead they tell the stories of 800 recent mothers. We hear about what happened to them during pregnancy and childbirth, what contributed to good and bad experiences of birth, and what women thought of the care they received. Ninety of the women went on to participate in interviews two years later. The result is a moving and powerful account of what it is like to be a mother in Australia in the 1990s. How do mothers' daily lives compare with accepted wisdom about 'good mothers'? How is the work of caring for children,running the household and providing financial support divided within the family? How do women feel about the care of children and work - both paid and unpaid? One in seven women was depressed in the year after birth. In Missing Voices they talk candidly about the origins of this depression and howthey coped with it. This is a book for all mothers (and fathers), for anyone contemplating having children, and for all those concerned about the health and well-being of mothers, children and families.

Hidden Costs, Value Lost
Hidden Costs, Value Lost

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2003-06-19

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0309133203

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Hidden Cost, Value Lost, the fifth of a series of six books on the consequences of uninsurance in the United States, illustrates some of the economic and social losses to the country of maintaining so many people without health insurance. The book explores the potential economic and societal benefits that could be realized if everyone had health insurance on a continuous basis, as people over age 65 currently do with Medicare. Hidden Costs, Value Lost concludes that the estimated benefits across society in health years of life gained by providing the uninsured with the kind and amount of health services that the insured use, are likely greater than the additional social costs of doing so. The potential economic value to be gained in better health outcomes from uninterrupted coverage for all Americans is estimated to be between $65 and $130 billion each year.